<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<meta charset="UTF-8">
<title>Breath-Stealer by TouchingOldMagic</title>
<style type="text/css">

body { background-color: #ffffff; }
.CI {
text-align:center;
margin-top:0px;
margin-bottom:0px;
padding:0px;
}
.center   {text-align: center;}
.cover    {text-align: center;}
.full     {width: 100%; }
.quarter  {width: 25%; }
.smcap    {font-variant: small-caps;}
.u        {text-decoration: underline;}
.bold     {font-weight: bold;}
</style>
</head>
<body>
<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/23929729">Breath-Stealer</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/TouchingOldMagic/pseuds/TouchingOldMagic'>TouchingOldMagic</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Ghostbusters (Comics), Ghostbusters - All Media Types</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Bust Fic, Client POV, Creepy, Gen, Oneshot</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-04-30</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-04-30</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-02 21:54:19</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>2,277</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/23929729</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/TouchingOldMagic/pseuds/TouchingOldMagic</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>A young woman wakes in her apartment one night to find she's not alone. Where're the professionals when you need them?</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>2</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>10</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Breath-Stealer</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>My idea for this one was to tell a story from the POV of one of the Ghostbusters' clients.</p><p>The opening scene is based on a real nightmare I had in college. o_o'</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Shirley Barton opened her eyes in the middle of the night.</p><p>Her bedroom was bathed in yellow from the streetlight outside her apartment window, showing off the college senior's possessions in monochrome. A dresser stood against the wall to her right and a full bookcase opposite, the top shelves were covered in knickknacks, mementos, and an open jewelry box. The bottom shelves had tumbling rows of books, paperback romances mixed in with last semester's textbooks that the school store wouldn't buy back. Her jacket and leggings were on the floor where she had dropped them. It was all as it should be. She didn't know what could have awakened her.</p><p>A shadow moved at the foot of her bed. Shirley tried to turn her head to see what was moving but found herself frozen, unable to do more than dart her eyes down as low as they would go. The dark shape shifted again, separating itself from the other yellowed shadows of the room. It was the shape of a person, a black silhouette crouched at the foot of her bed. She couldn't tell anything about it, gender or hair or clothing. It was a black person-shaped thing that seemed to suck all the wan light out of the room. Then it opened two lamplight eyes, round and white without pupils, and stared right at her.</p><p>Shirley wanted to scream but found only silence.</p><p>This wasn't reality. It couldn't be. This was like a scene from a movie. She felt separated from what was going on, like she was watching someone else. Was this a dream?</p><p>Again she tried to move her head, but every part of her body was paralyzed. Her throat wouldn't move to make a sound, her arms wouldn't push her up out of bed. She couldn't even pull her legs away from the sitting thing. Her fear spiraled higher and higher. Was her heart even beating?</p><p>Like an old movie with no sound, the tableau was eerie in silence. She couldn't hear the thump of the washers and driers in the laundry room at the end of the hall, or her neighbor who often played music with a deep bass at night. She couldn't even hear herself breathing.</p><p>Then the thing started moving toward her.</p><p>It raised a stick-like arm and set it down on her blanket. Then a second. One slow, agonizing movement at a time, the thing crawled its way up her bed. Even as it got closer, she still couldn't tell if it had claws or hands or hair or even a face. It was just a black silhouette with those staring, headlight eyes.</p><p>Shirley again tried to jerk her arms up, to push her blankets away. She couldn't move. She focused on her hands, lying limp under the covers. If she could just lift them--!</p><p>Suddenly a loud, rapid knocking was coming from her front door. All at once the spell was broken. Shirley shrieked and sat up, startled right out of her paralysis. Her eyes darted around the room. Everything was exactly as it had been a moment ago: the bookshelf, the dresser, the jacket and leggings on the floor. Except the thing that had been on her bed was gone.</p><p>She let out a shaking breath. It had been a dream, then. A very weird, very real-seeming nightmare, not like any she had had before. She didn't even like horror movies! Thankfully the knocking had woken her up.</p><p>Wait, who was knocking on her door in the middle of the night?</p><p>The loud banging had stopped in the span of time it took her to have these thoughts. Then it started up again, goading her to scramble out of bed. She swayed, standing in the middle of her bedroom floor. The knocking changed to a staccato tune, the old "shave and a haircut" routine (which she only knew from watching <i>Who Framed Roger Rabbit</i> as a kid).</p><p>They weren't going to go away, whoever they were. Quickly, as the tune turned into a truly urgent pounding, she threw her bathrobe over the T-shirt she slept in, tying the terrycloth strip that served as a belt. She hurried from her bedroom to the living room and her front door. Keeping the chain on, she cautiously opened it enough to see who was standing in the hall.</p><p>There was a mechanic standing there in beige coveralls, looking at her with friendly eyes and a slight smile that widened when she finally opened the door, as if he were recognizing an old friend (or at least, someone he appreciated seeing). His hand was raised to knock again and she noticed thick, black rubber gloves. Not a mechanic, then, a cleaning service? In the middle of the night? There was something mechanical on his shoulders and in her tired befuddlement from the surreal night so far, she assumed it was one of those professional vacuums or carpet cleaners that she'd seen people in the cleaning industry wear.</p><p>She wondered if she looked as shaken up as she felt, because the man's voice, when he spoke, sounded like someone trying to talk a cat down out of a tree. "Hey there. How're you doing tonight, miss? Anything disturbing you?"</p><p><i>You,</i> she wanted to say, but held her tongue. In her defense, it was a weird question to get after being woken up from a nightmare in the middle of the night.</p><p>"Um, it's late," she started dubiously. Her wall clock as she'd stumbled past on her way to the door had read just past 1 A.M. "Did the landlord hire you? You can come back in the daytime--" She stopped suddenly in surprise as the narrow hall was filled with a sudden urgent beeping noise.</p><p>"It's coming back around," said a deep and distracted voice from beyond the edge of her view. She hadn't realized there was more than one person standing outside her door. A whole cleaning crew?</p><p>The man in front spoke up, faster than before. "Kid, we're the Ghostbusters, we're gonna have to ask you to step out into the hall." He turned his shoulder enough for her to see the logo of a ghost in a circle on his upper sleeve. "No big deal, nothing to worry about at all, but hurry up, couldja?"</p><p>The Ghostbusters! She felt her face flush and only then noticed the name patch on his chest that read VENKMAN in red. Well, that made much more sense than a nighttime cleaning service. Where even was her brain? Still she hesitated for one more moment. It had just been a nightmare, hadn't it? And she really didn't want to stand in the hallway in nothing but a bathrobe and a T-shirt with no bra in front of strangers. She had enough trouble with someone in the building she suspected of taking her underwear from the laundry room.</p><p>The beeping thing grew more insistent, turning the sound into a continuous whine. A third voice muttered to the spokesman, "It's in the room with her."</p><p>He probably thought he was speaking low enough that she wouldn't hear, but she knew from experience that her building's narrow halls tended to cup sound, and the result was automatic. She whirled around with a shriek, but it died off to a confused meep when she saw nothing in the room except her couch and coffee table, exactly as they always were.</p><p>Then the shadows moved at the far end of the couch, as if someone was crouched behind the arm and shifted their stance to turn in her direction. A pair of round white eyes appeared where the head would be, staring directly at her. She screeched again.</p><p>Venkman's voice said sharply behind her, "Hey, kid, the chain!"</p><p>"Never mind, move over, Pete!" The fourth voice was accompanied by a solid thump, the sound of someone kicking the door directly behind her. She felt the impact shake the air.</p><p>Some part of Shirley's brain knew that the best thing to do would be to turn around and unlock the chain on the door. She wanted to, really, but she couldn't. She was frozen, unable to take her eyes from the shape beside the couch. A primitive, shrilly insistent part of her brain informed her that the moment she looked away, she would be done in. She could only stand there and shake as the creature made of shadow unfolded itself and climbed up onto the arm of the couch, crouched like it was prepared to spring.</p><p>A sharp crack behind her, right by her ear, woke her. She instinctively dove to the side just in time to keep herself from being slammed by the door as it went flying open. Louder even than the sound of the door hitting the wall was a furious screech from the direction of her couch, something that didn't sound at all like a living creature and more like the scream of tortured metal from a car accident.</p><p>Before she could react there were hands on her. She shrieked and struggled until she realized it was one of the Ghostbusters, Venkman. He had both hands around her upper arms and lifted her up to her feet as three other men poured into the room behind him. Her living room wasn't that large; the five of them were already crowding it without the addition of the monster on the couch.</p><p>She found herself pushed out the front door. "Stay here!" Venkman said urgently. She caught a brief glance of the splintered wood and damaged door frame as he pushed her outside. She felt a moment's burst of anxiety--oh no what was the landlord going to say?--before her brain informed her how stupid that was. The landlord was the least of her problems right now.</p><p>Venkman shoved her out and then slammed the door closed in her face. The chain had been broken off the door frame, but the door still closed and latched without an issue.</p><p>With that, the noise from her apartment became muffled. Shirley hugged her arms around herself and looked up and down the hallway, standing there in the middle of the night in nothing but a T-shirt and robe. At least none of her neighbors had been roused from their own apartments yet, and with the amount of knocking the Ghostbuster had been doing, that was a surprise. She prayed the thing (a ghost? But it didn't look like a ghost) would be taken care of quickly.</p><p>With the door closed she could just barely make out the voices of the men in her apartment.</p><p>"There it is, there it is, get it!"</p><p>"Zed, it's trying for the ceiling! Don't let it go off into another apartment again!"</p><p>A loud mechanical hum came with the voices, and then a crash. Shirley winced and wondered what it was.</p><p>"Get out of there, you nasty gooper! This is the twentieth century, now we ask before we get into a lady's bed!"</p><p>More crashing. A surge of electric screeches and wails. The monster's car accident voice. Wordless shouting, and a mechanical hiss. One more crash.</p><p>Silence descended. Shirley waited three heartbeats and then cautiously stepped closer.</p><p>The door opened and immediately smoke began to billow out of her apartment. She jumped back. Was there a fire!? But no, it looked like all the smoke was coming from a shoebox-thing held in the tallest man's hands. His name tag read SPENGLER.</p><p>"I-is it gone?" Shirley hated the quiver in her voice. She kept her arms crossed in front of her chest.</p><p>"It won't be bothering you again, miss!" name tag STANTZ said cheerfully. "You're lucky we got here in time. We've been chasing this guy all night. That was a classic breath-stealer, a real nasty customer. They've prayed on people since before the eighteenth century, especially young women like yourself. Also known in other cultures as an old hag, a <i>pisadeira</i>, or a <i>kokma</i>. Their MO is to paralyze you, leave you trapped in your own bed until they sit on your chest and draw the air right out of your lungs!"</p><p>Shirley actually felt the blood drain from her face as her brain picked out the most frightening bits of information to focus on. "B-breath . . . stealer. . . ?"</p><p>Venkman pushed Stantz back. "What Ray means is that your apartment is now ghost free and safe, and you can go back to sleep, kid." He glanced over his shoulder at the broken door and the apartment beyond. "On second thought, maybe stay with a friend tonight. Your landlord has insurance, right? Have 'em send the bill over to the city, everything's covered these days. Ghost-free voters are happy voters."</p><p>"Insurance? Wait, what do you mean--I--why--?"</p><p>Spengler cleared his throat and gestured down the hall in a way that Shirley guessed she wasn't supposed to see.</p><p>Venkman coughed. "Oh we'd love to stay and chat but you know how it is. It's after business hours, we gotta get back to HQ. You have a good night." He waited, flashing her a broad smile, as the other three beat a hasty retreat down the hall. Then he followed right behind.</p><p>"Call us if there's any lingering miasma!" A cheerful voice called back to her before they rounded the corner, followed by someone else's, "Stop scaring the clients, Ray."</p><p>Shirley watched them retreat down the hall, her eyes wide in alarm. This had to be the wildest night of her life. It had been a normal day when she went to bed and now . . . insurance. . . ? She turned and looked into her apartment--and shrieked again.</p>
  </div></div>
</body>
</html>